Quotes from Rinker Buck

The 1836 Whitman-Spalding covered wagon train was the first to go beyond the Rockies and complete the Oregon Trail.

Historian Richard Slotkin has shown how the myth of Indian savagery was required to justify the subjugation of the tribes so that their prairie kingdoms could be seized by the Americans crossing the frontier after 1843. But that image, faithfully passed down by purple-sage novels and Hollywood westerns, is wildly inaccurate.

It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

Don't think. Just do it.

Their only real endowments were soft skills such as a willingness to accept the help of strangers, stubborn practicality, and the ability to live with uncertainty.

Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer, often described as the richest of his generation.

A great burden had been lifted from me.

It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

Now I knew a little bit more about how the pioneers felt as they embarked for the West. It was my jumping-off time and I was getting jacked around by the outfitters. •

Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.

Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities.

Fear was just a deceptive veil obscuring the unknown.

families, revealing insights that cannot be found in published histories. Brown doggedly cross-checks information about each grave in emigrant journals, land records, and nineteenth-century newspapers. A lifetime of searching for graves along the Oregon and California trails has also allowed him

Frequently, to be an American then was to be periodically unmoored, transient, so bereft of options that moving on was the only choice.

spring. The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America's basic means of transportation for a century—wagons and mules. Yes,

My last thought before falling asleep was that we are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think.

The endurance required should have been too much for us, but across these Nebraska plains endurance just begat more endurance.